Lichtblick

Lichtblick is what happened after Foxglove closed its studio. Bosch forked the last open source version and kept building on it. Load a robotics log, MCAP or ROS 1 and ROS 2 bags, and get 3D scenes, plots, image panels, and diagnostics in a layout you arrange yourself. Runs in a browser or as a desktop app on Linux, macOS, and Windows. MPL-2.0.

Nothing to host. It reads files on your machine or connects live to a running robot. Development is active with releases most months, and recent ones added H.265 video playback, a text filter in the node editor, and a rebuilt alerts system. The extension API lets you write panels for message types nobody else has, which is most of them once your robot has custom messages.

For teams who want the Foxglove Studio experience without an account or per seat pricing, this is the direct answer rather than an approximation. Solo researchers and students: free and complete. Small teams: free, and the logs never leave your machine, which matters when they contain customer sites. Large teams: free for the visualization layer, but Foxglove's hosted data platform, the part that searches across a whole fleet's worth of recordings, has no equivalent here.

The catch: this is a fork maintained by one company's team rather than a broad independent community, and it inherits a large Electron and TypeScript codebase. It tracks what it forked from more than it races ahead, so when Foxglove ships something genuinely new in the closed product, you either wait or you build it yourself.